Version 1.5 11/6/02 ||\ || || || || ||\\ || || || || || \\|| |||||| || || \|| || || ||||| ||| ||| ||| |||||||| ||||||| /// /// /// /// // /// /// /// /// // ///////// /// /// // /// /// /// /// // /// /// /// /// // /// /// /// /// ///////// 22222 00000 00000 33333 2 0 0 0 0 3 22222 0 0 0 0 33333 2 0 0 0 0 3 22222 00000 00000 33333 NHL Hitz 2003 Walkthrough by The Lost Gamer (ilovecartoonssomuch@yahoo.com) Copyright 2002 Table of Contents: 001. General information 002. Walkthrough 002a. Hockey School 002b. Exhibition 002c. Mini Games 002d. Franchise 002e. Season 002f. Tourney 002g. Options 003. Creditz 001-General Information ----------------------------------------------------------- This is a walkthrough for the Gamecube game called NHL Hitz 2003. It's a great game (I like it, anyway). You can e-mail at ilovecartoonssomuch@yahoo.com, but make the subject blank if you do. Also (terrible self-promotion), it'd be nice if you checked out my website: http://the_lost_gamer.tripod.com/ 002-Walkthrough ----------------------------------------------------------- Okay, let's start playing hockey! Of course, you'll need to know how to play before you actually do play, right? So start the game and choose Hockey School to learn how! 002a-Hockey School ----------------------------------------------------------- Welcome to Hockey School! Who's the coach for today? Why, it's Scotty Bowman, the NHL's all-time winningest coach! (Winningest isn't a real word, by the way). Scotty Bowman will help you go through all the lessons. When you're done, you'll know how to do every move in the game. First up will be Skating and Turbo. Use the control stick to skate around. Press the R button to do a Turbo Skate. If you use turbo, you go a bit faster than normal. However, you can only do turbo if there is something in your turbo meter, which refills when you aren't doing turbo. The Turbo Skate move helps you out a lot when you play the game, and you shouldn't have to worry about the turbo meter going empty too much. Next lesson is select player. I recommend doing turbo here until your turbo meter is empty to see what it's like. You can do that a couple of times, and then you need to get on with the lesson. Simply press A and you get to control the player closest to the puck. You can only do this if you don't have the puck. This isn't hard, and you'll be able to use this while playing without thinking about it. Next lesson is the most important lesson: the body check. Press X to check someone (you can't check your teammates, which is sort of lame). Checking is important. I recommend redoing the select player lesson again to practice your checking. And to make it cooler, do a check while doing turbo! Checking is awesome! And what's even cooler is the fact that you can check people through the boards! The only bad part is that you can't check someone while you have the puck. Once you've had enough fun with checking, you need to learn how to do a stick check. Press B to do a stick check. Basically, a stick check (sometimes the announcers call it a poke check) is knocking the puck away from an opponent without checking him. You should use this if your opponent is on a breakaway, as you can be far off and still stick check. Next lesson is the block shot. Press L when you're in between the player with the puck and the net. You get on your knees and block his shot. Next up is the block pass. Same thing as the block shot, except you block a pass, not a shot. Not too difficult. Next you start to work with the puck. If you have the puck, press A to pass it. You also need to press the control stick somewhat towards the person you're passing to. Most of the time the passes go to the person you want. This isn't tough. Next you need to do a wrist shot. Press B when you have the puck (just press it, don't hold it down). There's the wrist shot. Next is the slap shot. Same as the wrist shot, except that you hold B down. The longer you hold it, the harder you hit the puck. Be warned, if you're winding up for a slap shot, it is the ideal time for an opponent to take the puck. Next, you learn the one timer. This is an important move, you can score a LOT if you master it. Press A to pass the puck to a player. If you press B before he gets the puck, he will shoot the puck the second he gets it. It doesn't seem like much, but it is very important. Next up is the complicated fake shot. Press B like you would for a slap shot, but at the top of the windup, press X. You end up not doing a slap shot. This is useful for faking out the goalie, and if you master it, you can score often. It's hard, however, and I still have yet to master it. Next up is the equally complicated fake shot pass. Hold B like you would for a slap shot, and press A at the top of your windup to pass it instead of shoot if. If you're really good, you can have your other player do a one-timer then. I can't do it, but if you can do it, you must be virtually unstoppable. Next lesson is easier, the deke. A deke is when your player does a little spin thingie. This stops him from being checked, and can also confuse a goalie. Perform a deke at any time by pressing Y. Next is the guard puck. If you have the puck, press X to do it. Nobody can stick check you while you do this, so if you're on a breakaway and a defender is close behind you, you might want to do this. Onto the last lessons: the short dump, clearing dump, and boards dump. If you have the puck, press L to dump it. How hard you dump the puck depends on how hard you push down L. A boards dump is the exact same thing, except along the boards. There's one move that you don't learn in hockey school, but I'll talk about that in the next section. Yay! You finished hockey school! Scotty Bowman expects a top-noch performance from you now, no excuses. You've also unlocked the jungle stadium (you unlock items as you do certain things. The jungle stadium is simply an arena for you to play in). 002b-Exhibition ----------------------------------------------------------- Time to play a game of your own. Choose exhibition mode. You get to select the home team and the away team. The possible teams are all the NHL teams, some country-based teams (Team Russia, Team USA, etc.), and some crazy teams that most likely don't exist (for example the scourge or the seadogs (every person on the seadog team is a pirate)). Once you've decided which team is what, choose which team you will play as and move ahead by pressing A. Now you get to choose your lineup. Choose a person to play center, a person to play wing, and a person to play defense. Finally, choose who you want as goalie. The players' stats are shown so you can get a good idea of which position is best for which player. You can mess around with a person's stats if you want to. Next you choose the uniforms. Each team has two (or more) uniforms to choose from. Once you like the uniforms, move ahead with A. Now you need to choose the rink to play in. You can play in the home team's rink or some other rinks (most of the random rinks, such as the moon, belong to the random teams I talked about earlier). You can also choose weather conditions (none, rain or snow). This is just a cool effect which makes it seem like you're playing in actual rain or snow. Once you're done, you get to start the game. While the game loads, you get to see a refresher of all the moves (just a screen showing all the buttons and their corresponding moves). Also on this screen is the one move you don't learn in hockey school, the on-fire move. As you check and do other cool stuff, your on-fire meter in the upper corner of the screen fills up. Once the first meter is full, press Z. The player with the puck lights on fire for about 30 seconds. During this time, everything he does is better (his speed, likelihood of scoring, etc.). If you wait until both meters are full, everyone on your team gets on fire. It's a cool effect. But now it's time to play. The announcers do a little pre-game thing where they announce the starting line-ups. Then it's time to drop the puck. On the face-offs, you can press A, B, or X. You do a different thing depending on which one you press. Each move can beat another move, for instance, a B move beats an A move. If you're good, you can use this to your advantage and win almost every face-off. After the face-off, it's time to play. Do your best. There's some things that you should know. You can get a penalty, but only if you check the goalie or get in a fight. You can't get more than one penalty, so when you're a man down, you can check the opposing team's goalie all you want (it's easy to score when the goalie is on his butt). Fighting is important. Every now and then, two players get in a fight. This happens depending on the game play (say two players are constantly checking each other). Now you get in fight mode. You have to try to drain the opponent's energy before you lose yours. Press A to punch his face, B to hit his chest, X to grab onto him and do several punches, Y to block, and the control stick to dodge around. Fighting is fun! After a period is over, you can choose new players to play (or keep the old ones). If one of your players lost a fight, you can't choose him or her. If a penalty is going on, one of your players will have to come in as the person with the penalty. If the game is over, and there's a tie, you can choose how to end the game. You can go into sudden death overtime (you play until a team scores, and that team wins) or have a shoot-out (five players from each team each get a breakaway, and the team with the most goals at the end wins). After the game is done, you can check out the stats for the game, or exit the game. When you're done, exit the game. A trivia question pops up. Try to get it right, and after the answer is revealed you get the option to save your trivia standpoint (it just keeps track of which questions you have answered and how many points you have---you get something if you get over 200 points). After that, you go back to the main screen. If you press start, the game is paused and you get a complicated- looking screen. It's not too hard to understand, but it can cause problems, so I'll have to explain it here. You get a bunch of things you can choose from: Resume Game, Replay, Options, Stats Central, User Control, Controllers and Exit Game. The two easy ones are resume game and exit game. If you choose exit game, it asks if you want to stop playing the game you're playing right now (the hockey game, not the entire NHL Hitz game). If you choose resume game, play resumes. Replay is a cool feature, but it isn't long enough. Basically, it replays the last 10-something seconds of the game. You can look at whatever happened during this time at any angle. Cool. Press Z if you want to hide the help box (it takes everything offscreen except for the game). Press A to play the footage, and B to rewind it. Press X to play it in slow motion, and Y to rewind it in slow motion. R zooms in and L zooms out. The c-stick controls the target (which is always in the center of the screen), and the control stick controls the angle. Press Start to go back to the pause menu. The replay function is cool (slow-motion replays of checks are awesome), but like I said, isn't long enough. The user control section is easy enough to understand. Move your control stick around to go where you want. You can control a single player (this means you control them the whole time, no matter what) or a team. You can switch teams if you want, and set up a team for CPU control. Not too tough. The controllers section isn't too tough either. There are six different control schemes you can use. I use the one the game automatically starts with, as there's no big problem with it. Choose another one if you don't like it. The stats central section is also quite easy. If you choose it, you get to choose one of five subsections: team stats, player stats, user stats, scoring summary of penalty summary. This shows a bunch of stats like + -, breakaways, short- handed goals, etc. Now onto the tougher sections. The options section has several subsections: Game options, display options, sound options, coaching strategy, and advanced options. The latter has several subsections of its own. In Game Options, you can mess around with the game speed, skill level, penalties, fighting, tie breaker, mercy rule, and advanced options. The game speed is how fast the game plays (you have a meter that you can empty/fill depending on how fast you want it). The skill level is either rookie, pro, or all-star. The players will play at the level you choose, so try to choose a level you're comfortable at. The penalties option turns penalties on (they can be called) or off (nobody can get a penalty). The fighting option is exactly the same as the penalty option except it deals with fighting, not penalties. The tie breaker lets you decide what will happen if the game ends in a tie. You can have a shootout, sudden death (I talked about those earlier), or have the user decide if the situation occurs. The advanced options, er, option lets you decide which advanced options to use (you have five to choose from, which you can make yourself, and the one the game starts with). In Display Options, you can mess around with camera zoom, camera type, auto replay, score overlay, turbo meters, shot speed, indicators, and hot spot. Camera zoom allows you to adjust the amount the camera zooms into the action as you play. The camera type lets you choose where the camera is (overhead, ice, and side). The auto replay lets you turn auto replay on or off (after a goal is scored, you get to see two replays of the goal, a normal speed one and a slow-motion one. You can decide not to see these replays at all). The score overlay allows you to hide or show the score overlay (this means that you can see the team logos, scores, on fire meters, period number, and time left). The shot speed lets you turn shot speed on or off (if you take a shot, the game occasionally lets you know how fast it was in MPH). The turbo meters let you show or hide the turbo meters. Indicators lets you decide how the players are identified (either by name, number, user, or no way at all). The hot spot shows or hides a team's hot spot (if you take a shot from the hot spot, you have a greater likelihood of scoring). The Sound Options section lets you mess around with the music volume (how loud the game is), the sound fx (sound effects, sounds like skates hitting the ice, the sound heard when a player takes a slap shot, the sound you hear when a player is checked, etc.), the crowd volume (how loud the crowd is), broadcast volume (how loud the announcers are), broadcast setting, music setting and speaker setting. Broadcast setting is play by play, color, play by play and color, or none. This simply deals with how the announcers announce. The music setting lets you hear game sound or the soundtrack while playing. The speaker settings are automatically set in the optimal choice. Press Y to see the jukebox. Songs from the jukebox play when the game is paused, and you can play them during normal game play (choose soundtrack for music setting). You can turn certain songs on or off depending on your tastes. You can sample a song by pressing X. The Coaching Strategy section isn't tough, but if you don't know what it means, then you wouldn't be able to figure it out. You can mess around with display, offensive, and defense styles. If you push the right analog stick during play, the coaching strategy box pops up. You can mess around with it while playing (that's called multitasking). That's kind of hard, so you can turn your ability to do that off. There are three offensive strategies: passive, aggressive, and normal. Passive offense means that when you're in the other team's zone, you will have two players at the blue line throughout the duration. Aggressive defense means you will have the normal triangle strategy (this is a standard strategy. Two guys play offense and the third guy sticks on defense at the blue line. One of the two offensive people should easily be able to get back on defense if he is needed). Normal defense means that the defense is back, the wing is ahead, and the center is in between them. Choose whichever one works best for you in the current situation. There are three defensive strategies: cherrypick, zone, and man to man. Cherrypick is a hockey term; a cherrypicker is someone who actively tries to get a breakaway. If you select this form of defense, you will have two men cherrypickers. If you choose zone, each person will control their own zone, which means they will defend only a certain part of the ice. With all three players working, all of the ice gets covered. Man on man defense means that each player will defend against a certain player on the opposing team. Choose whichever one you want. Now onto the hard part: advanced options. There are five slots you can have (Custom 1, Custom 2, Custom 3, Custom 4, and Custom 5 (you can rename these)). If you make your own custom setup, don't forget to enable it under game options under options. Also, you'll want to save it (see the options section of this guide, section 002f). Once you choose a custom slot, you get 6 big things you can customize (Gameplay, AI, Goalies, Player Attributes, Fighting, and Visuals). Gameplay lets you mess with the on fire effect (you get a meter to change how powerful it is (note that the more powerful it is, the more likely it is that the CPU will use it)), puck out of play (if it is off, the puck is in play at all times. If it is on, the puck can get out of play and land in the stands), lose fight penalty (lets you decide if there should be penalties after a fight or not), bulldozer puck (if you enable this, the puck will plow through players, knocking them over), pass interception (you can change the likelihood of passes being intercepted, if you need to for some reason, of which I know one), and post whistle time (just how much time you can do things after a whistle blows. Hitting someone after the whistle blows is a good way of starting a fight). AI controls the game's Artifical Intelligence. You can turn catch up logic on or off (if it is on, it is easier for the losing team to score goals. This just makes the game a bit more interesting). You also have frequency meters so you can mess around with how often the non-human controlled players stick check, body check, deke, and do guard pucks. Goalie options lets you mess around with the goalie to make it easier or harder to score. Say you're in an important game and you're ahead. You can make it almost impossible for anyone to score so the other team won't ruin your lead (the only downside is that you can't score). There are meters for goalie fatigue (how fast the goalie can move), possession bonus (this means that the longer you have the puck, the slower the other team's goalie becomes), shot bonus (means you can score more if you're taking "more shots on goal"), attribute bonus (how effective a player's shooting attributes are), one-timer bonus (how often one-timers end up in goals), open shot bonus (your chances of scoring if you shoot at an empty net (which are pretty good in the first place)), hot spot bonus (how effective a shot from the hot spot is), and breakaway bonus (how effective breakaway shots are). Player attributes can be changed to make players better or worse. You can increase or decrease the effectiveness of their shooting, checking, passing, and speed abilities. Fighting lets you mess around with fights to make them easier or harder. You can increase or decrease fight difficulty (how hard it is to win a fight), fight health (how large the health meters are during fights), punch damage (how much damage a punch does), block punch damage (the amount of damage inflicted when a punch is blocked), and max fights game (messes around with the maximum number of fights you can have in a game). Visuals deals with the puck and the players. Player head mode will make the controlled players' heads normal, big or huge. It looks somewhat funny when you see a small player with a huge head. The team head mode is the same as player head, except it affects both teams, not just the controlled players. Puck size lets you mess around with how big the puck is. Puck shadow lets you see the puck shadow or not (this can help if the puck is high up in the air and you can tell where it will land accordingly). Puck effect lets you mess around with puck effects; you can choose streak (the puck streaks), trail (the puck leaves a trail), blur (the puck gets blurry), or off (none at all). Puck glow lets you choose the puck color: green, yellow, red, blue, or off (which is black). Show crowd lets you decide if you want the crowd to be shown or not. Whew! That was a lot! Don't forget to activate those advance options, or else you might waste a lot of effort. Hope you enjoy playing NHL Hitz! 002c-Mini Games ----------------------------------------------------------- Maybe you've mastered the game, and want some mini-games to play. Maybe you want to play with your friend, but not have him or her waste time learning how to play. Maybe you're lazy and don't want to learn how to play. Whatever the case is, you can play mini-games. Several mini-games have non-human characters. They look cool. So, anyway, you can play three in a row, own the ice, king of the rink, keep away, shootout, and shooting gallery. Three in a row is basically tic-tac-toe. Two people take turns taking shots at the board. You want to get three of your symbols (X or O) in a row. If you hit a spot, it will change to have your symbol on it. While your opponent shoots, you can choose one square that he cannot hit (keep in mind he can do the same to you. Use this option wisely). Easy mini-game to understand. Own the Ice is a bit more complicated. You see, there are five big circles in a hockey rink (the center circle, and two in each zone). You want to obtain the puck, and skate over all five of these circles. The circle is colored depending on who skated over it last. You win if all five are colored your color. If time runs out, the person who has skated over more circles wins. King of the Rink is a free-for-all. Four players play. The rink is circular (it's a small rink). You get points for checking other players with X (if you knock someone out of the rink, you get bonus points), and points from tripping other players with B. Whoever has the most points at the end wins. Remember it's a free-for-all (every player for himself). Keep Away is an inventive concept. There are teams of two. Each team gets points for passing the puck from teammate to teammate and points for having possession of the puck. The team with more points at the end wins. Simple concept, just keep the puck away from the other team. Shootout is just like the shootouts at the end of a tied game. Players take turns being the shooter and the goalie. There are five chances to score for both players. As the goalie, you can poke check (B) and body check (X). You don't have to do anything to save the puck as the game automatically lets that happen. If there is a tie, the game turns into sudden death. Shooting Gallery is another inventive concept. There are 21 windows. If a player gets close enough to a window, he can shoot the puck and break it. The team with the most broken windows wins. Sounds easy, but isn't. That's all for mini-games. Try to beat the records set by Midway for cool new stuff! 002d-Franchise ----------------------------------------------------------- Ah, one of the best parts of the game. You get to create your own team, and play as them. If you beat all eight rounds, something special happens (I'm not going to tell you what, but you can guess). This is really cool. Once you start a franchise, you need a name. Choose a name for your franchise (this should be a city, as all the NHL franchises have cities for their names). Next choose your team level, rookie, pro, or all-star. You can make your team manually, or have the computer automatically make one for you. Doing it manually results in a better team. There are five things you can mess around with before moving on. You can mess with your team name (the one you chose earlier). You have to choose one of the nicknames they have available (as it would be near-impossible for the announcers to announce every team-name possibility). This seems complicated, but isn't. If you choose Detroit Red Wings, Detroit is the team name, and the Red Wings is how the announcers refers to them. Choose one you like (I'm the Saratoga Sledgehammers). The team logo is simple enough. Choose a logo for your team. The team jersey colors depend upon the logo you choose. Choose wisely, there are a lot of logos to choose from. The Hot Spot is also easy. Move it to a place you shoot from often. If you shoot from the hot spot, there is a greater chance of it going in. Last is the coaching style, which I explained about earlier (search this document for coaching strategy to find it). When you like all of these (you can always change them later, go ahead. You now get to mess around with the players for your team (you get more players as you progress through the rounds. I don't think you can trade a player, but you can change him completely). You get to choose a player's first and last names. (Some of my more interesting player names are Adam Corolla, Jimmy Kimmel, Abe Lincoln, George Bush, and Mortimer Gibralter). You have to choose a nickname for him or her also (the announcers refer to the players by this name. There are many of these). You can choose the player's number. Next you can mess with preferences, which concerns the player's stickhand (right or left), preferred position (center, wing, or defense), and favorite shot (they score more if they take their favorite shots, which are wrist, slap, backhand and one-timer). You can also deal with a player's playstyle. You can mess around with their height and weight (the bigger they are, the slower they move). You can also choose a style of play for your player (there are quite a few of these, like all- around, enforcer, grinder, defender, powerforward, and playmaker). You can see the effects of what you choose on the player's statistics, which are shown. What's really cool is messing around with a player's appearance. You can go as crazy as you want with this, you can make an alien, a demon, or even a guy who looks like Jesus. The same things apply for the goalie. Once you've finished with all your players, you get sent to the locker room. You don't need to know this, but I'm giving you an idea of my team's line-up so you can know how it works. I have three defenders who are as big as possible (they all are green aliens). They check a lot, and are really useful for me. I always use them in tough games, as they literally beat the competition. I have a tall center (Abe Lincoln) who is also good at kicking butt. With him and a defender on the ice, that's a pretty good defense. My other center is a black guy named Steve Sikes who is an all-around playmaker and is also very useful. My wingers are mere clones of each other. They are all pirates. I usually start off a game with Sikes, a winger, and a defenseman. Depending on how the game goes, I change the line-up. Do whatever the hell you want. You can copy my team exactly, or do your own thing. Whatever. On to talking about the locker room. In the locker room, you can choose world map (more about that later), team, players, equipment, captain, and experience. If you choose team, you go back to the screen where you got to edit your team name and other stuff. If you choose players, you go back to messing around with players. If you choose captain, you get to choose a team captain. Whoever is captain, all of their skills are increased by five points. Make sure the captain is somebody you use a lot, or you could be wasting those five points. A good strategy is to make the goalie the captain. If you choose equipment, you can mess around with the players' equipment. Depending on the equipment a player wears, their stats change a bit. You start out with standard equipment, but you get more equipment if you beat world teams (more on that later). If you choose experience, you get to mess around with your team's experience. You get experience points by completing tasks (more later). You can use these points to boost your players' skills. Now onto world map. The world map is a globe. On the globe are four teams you can play, and five you can't. Each of the four teams has its own tasks. You want to try to complete all the tasks in a game and win. The tasks are things like get 10 shots on goal and deke twice. Do as many tasks as you can. If you beat all four teams, you get to play the fifth team (which is a world team). World teams are better than all of the four teams. Beat a world team to move onto the next round. Each round has its own five teams. After the second round, you start playing real NHL teams. If you press start, you get a screen. One of the options allows you to save the franchise. If you do, remember to save over old franchise data. The screen also allows you to exit back to the main screen. This screen also allows you to check out a task list (it lists every task that you can do, with a check next to all the ones you have done). Also there is the team stats, and the team report (which shows each player's roster, the team's overall report, and the game star rankings (which just shows how many times each player has been a game star)). For more information, do a search for those things in this document, as I talk about them in greater detail below. 002e-Season ----------------------------------------------------------- The season mode is also cool. You can choose several things when starting a season. First off is mode. You can play the normal season, or the playoff season. Choose whichever one you want. Next is the difficulty level. You can choose rookie, pro, or all-star, depending on what you want. Next is the number of games. You can play 14, 29, 58, or the standard 82 games in your season. Next is the playoff length. This controls how long teams play each other in the playoffs. You can choose one game (this means that the teams play only one game and the victor moves ahead), or best of three, five, or seven games. Next is fantasy draft. If this is off, you can control normal NHL teams. If it is on, you can choose your own roster for your team. Next is trade deadline. You can establish a date for the deadline. After this date, there can be no trades. Next is the trade logic. If this is on, no unfair trades can be made (like trading Roy, Foote, and Foresburg for a bad player). Next up is all-star game. You get to choose the type of all-star game there will be. Once you're done with that, you get a screen with all the teams that'll play that season. Press X to control a certain team. Control as many teams as you'd like to. Okay, you're done! Just like in franchise mode, that's not it, though. Now you're at the screen you'll see most in season mode, the Season Central screen. The right hand side of the screen will show information about the last game you played (the score you got, the score your opponent got, and the star of the game). It also shows your team's record (# of wins, then number of losses). Underneath that informative box is another box. It shows your next match-up. More specifically, it shows your team's logo, the opponent's logo, and the date. If you have more than one team you're controlling, press L and R to move among them. You can't have one team play too many games more than another team; they need to have about an equal number of games played. The game prevents you from doing this, so if you get a message to play as another team, that's what the message means. On the left-hand part of the screen is a menu. You can choose play game, rosters, team report, stats, calendar, standings, options, save season and exit season. If you choose play game, you play the game shown in the box with the two logos (if you can). If you choose save season, you save the season. If you choose exit season, you go back to the main menu. If you choose rosters, you can do a number of things. The first is team roster, like I said earlier. It shows each player's roster. The next thing you can do is actually create a player of your own (using the same player-creating techniques you used in franchise mode). The next thing you can do is trade a player. You can trade players, but if they are vastly different, you might not get the trade. Also, you can't trade goalies for non-goalies. If trading a player doesn't seem to work, you can get a free agent (which, coincidentally, is the next thing you can do). Sign any free player you like. If there's no room for him, you may have to dump a current player. The last thing you can do is jersey numbers. You can change the jersey numbers of the players on your team. Yes, not too useful, but still a necessary part of the game. Back to the Season Central screen. The team report shows a report for whichever team you're using at the moment. Easy. Also easy is the stats, which shows the statistics for the team you're playing. If you select calendar, a calendar is shown. It shows the lineup for your team for the rest of the year. If you choose standings, you can see the standings for the conferences (east and west), divisions (Atlantic, Northeast, Southeast, Central, Northwest and Pacific), and the entire NHL. I'm not talking about options again, that already took a good deal of time. Good luck with the season! And here's a helpful cheat: when you play a game, you decide which team you play (unlike franchise mode where you are always your team). If you are playing a tough team like the Avalanche, you can always choose to control your opponent's team. When you control your opponent's team, play poorly (have the goalie leave the net and such). You should lose, which means that the team your team won. Cool cheat, huh? 002f-Tourney ----------------------------------------------------------- On the final run here. If you've done the earlier sections, than this is a breeze. Basically, you create a tournament. You get to select any of the available teams to play in the tournament (NHL teams, franchise teams, teams like the Demon team). First, you need to select your level, rookie, pro, or all- star (that sounds familiar somehow...). Then you need to select the number of games to play among teams. Basically, two teams will play each other for that amount of games, and the one with the most wins moves on. It can be 1, 3, 5, or 7 games. Now you need to select a team (from the available teams). The setup from here is just like in season mode. Keep on playing games until you get thrown out of the tournement or you win the elusive Midway cup! Good luck! 002f-Options ----------------------------------------------------------- Okay, last part here. It's the end of this guide, so much has been covered before. That and the fact that I tend to get sloppy near the end of my guides may make this section lame. I hope not. If you choose options from the main menu, you get several things you can choose: Game options, sound options, display options, roster management, controllers, unlockables, advanced options, user record, user stats, save options, credits, and movies. I talked about advanced options, game options, sound options, controllers, and display options earlier in the guide (the 002b section). I'm not going to repeat myself. Roster management allows you to control the rosters across all game modes. You can trade players, sign free agents, and the like. Trades are never rejected in this mode. Unlockables is extremely cool. You see, if you do certain things, then certain things get unlocked. For example, normally you would never be able to play in the Jungle Stadium. However, if you finish Hockey School, it becomes unlocked and you can now use it. There are exactly 127 things you can unlock (stadiums, teams, jerseys, player heads, player models). You get to see what you need to do to unlock something, and a description of it. This is incredibly deep, and I plan to write a guide on how to unlock everything in this game sometime in the future. User Records show the different records set in the game (most checks in a game, fastest times for beating mini-games, and other stuff). Midway has set all the records. Try to beat them (things get unlocked if you break certain records). User stats show your user records. You need to have chosen a name for yourself before this happens (as you're choosing a team to play as in a game, press X to do this). There can be more than one user saved in the game. Save options allows you to save all the stuff here in this section. I highly recommend that you do this for the first few times as you get used to the game, and when you're used to it, you won't have to save your options that much. It actually does save some time for you. (Poor me, my memory card is full so I have to reset the options every time I play the game, which gets very annoying). The credits gives credit to all the people who helped make the game. As the credits roll, you get to see a behind the scenes look at various events that took place in the making of the game. The Movies section has about three different movies. It contains some cool stuff they made while making the game (there's the cool opening promo that has real NHL footage and the cool song in the background, a thing that deals with Pronger, and something else I forget right now). Well, that's it. Have fun! 003-Creditz ----------------------------------------------------------- This FAQ is copyright of The Lost Gamer, 2002. If you want to use any part of this FAQ, ask me first (instructions under general information) This game is copyright Midway, 2002.